The Tucker Carlson Show
Tucker and Col. MacGregor Warn How Neocons Are Exploiting the Drug Crisis to Drag America Into War
30 Oct 2025
The prospect of regime changing Maduro is like Viagra to Lindsey Graham. Unfortunately it won’t prevent a single fentanyl death. Paid partnerships with: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off the new Pod 5 Ultra at https://EightSleep.com/Tucker SimpliSafe: Visit https://simplisafe.com/TUCKER to claim 50% off a new system. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. PureTalk: Go to https://PureTalk.com/Tucker to and save 50% off your first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the implications of a potential regime change in Venezuela?
Not to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like we're about to embark on another regime change war like next week. There's so much going on right now in this country that you may not be aware that there is a U.S. naval armada steaming toward Venezuela, which is a large oil rich country in South America, not too far from here, actually.
And the purpose, the stated purpose of this show of military force is to force the leader of that country, Nicolas Maduro, to leave. And the threat is unless he leaves, vacates the premises, gives up his job, turns over the reins to the opposition party, splits Venezuela for good, the United States will go to war with Venezuela, invade it even. Kind of a big deal.
You may not even have known that. Very few people seem to be talking about that. Again, there's a lot else going on, but it's a pretty significant turn of events if you think about it. It's not every day the United States has another regime change war.
Chapter 2: How is the U.S. military presence influencing the situation in Venezuela?
In fact, it's been quite some time. We had a narrowly averted regime change war back in June with Iran. They were telling you the point was just to stop its nuclear program. Of course, the point was to change the leadership in Tehran. President Trump pulled back. That didn't happen. Thank God. But we are on the cusp of something very similar happening not too far from here.
And an awful lot could go wrong. And yes, we're fully aware that anyone who points out the potential downside possibilities of a war is not only a wuss, but unpatriotic, hysterical.
Chapter 3: What historical context is relevant to the U.S. involvement in Venezuela?
The fact that Caracas, Venezuela, the capital, by the way, you'll be hearing a lot more about it if we go to war there. Caracas, Venezuela, the main population center and capital of Venezuela, is about 475 miles by sea from San Juan, Puerto Rico, the American protectorate. So really from our country. Pretty darn close. Super close. And that's significant not because...
Venezuela's SEAL teams are going to blow up Puerto Rico, but because wars tend to precipitate huge movements of people. They cause migrant crises. They cause massive and irreversible demographic change. This has always been true, always been true.
Chapter 4: How does drug trafficking relate to the current crisis in Venezuela?
But we have a couple of pretty recent reminders back in 2015. with the help of the U.S. government at the urging of our closest ally in the Middle East, the Syrian Civil War raged. And there were lots of players in that war, but the United States was certainly one of them. And as the result of the Syrian Civil War, which most Americans were not paying attention to, Europe got invaded by migrants.
Remember the migrant crisis of 2015? You may not remember because it never ended. In the 10 years since that, 1.3 million-ish asylum seekers arrived in Western Europe. Western Europe has been completely destroyed. Totally unrecognizable. That's not an overstatement. Go to Paris, go to London, go to Oslo.
Go to any capital in Western Europe, and it does not look Western European, and clearly that entire part of the continent is on the dramatic downswing. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the main reason is immigration, mass migration due to war. So that's not a hysterical position. It's not crazy to worry about that, considering we're pretty close to Venezuela. So that could happen.
Also, people get killed in war. Whenever you commit troops to a place, even if you bomb a place, there are after effects, there are ripples, and people die, and some of those people are apt to be your people. So if you have a war, it's fair to expect some Americans will die.
Chapter 5: What are the root causes of America's drug crisis according to the guests?
And of course, we've had a lot of wars in the last hundred years, and Americans have been prepared to bear that cost. Not usually the same Americans starting the wars or cheering on the wars. They never bear that cost because they never show up at the war. People like Lindsey Graham haven't been to a lot of wars.
But most Americans are aware of the fact that when you have a war, people die, including some of our guys. It's sad, but we tell ourselves it's worth the cost. But it's close to inevitable. All of that is just to say, before this happens, it would be nice to know why we're doing this. Why are we having a regime change war?
And by the way, unlike what happened in June, the people pushing this are just saying it right out loud. The purpose of this adventure is to replace the government of Venezuela. Now, we haven't liked the government of Venezuela for quite some time. It's been at least 10 years. They've been under pretty tough American sanctions.
There have been now publicized efforts to get rid of the leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and before him, his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who claimed as he died of cancer that he was infected with cancer by the CIA. No confirmation on that. But the point is, this is a conflict of longstanding.
The United States, under a number of different administrations, has said out loud, we would like someone else to run that country. Now, it's a little strange if you think about it, that one country can just say to another country, we don't like your leadership, leave or we'll kill you. But that's what we're doing.
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Chapter 6: How do current policies impact the effectiveness of drug treatment?
Is that a precedent you want to set? Well, we set it long ago. But what's interesting is it's hard to think of all the regime change affected by the United States and its various agencies whose budgets you can't know and whose activities are still decades later shattered in secrecy. Of all those regime changes affected by the U.S. government, how many worked out well?
Would anyone say that hanging Saddam Hussein made Iraq better, made the world safer, made America more prosperous? Well, it empowered Iran, for one thing. and so on and so on and so on. So to say the U.S. does not have a positive track record of regime change, that the after effects upon examination haven't been worth doing, I mean, that's an understatement. It never works.
But we're doing it again, apparently. So the question is, why? Why are we doing this? Why are we so opposed to Nicolas Maduro? So if you ask someone on the street, you're going to get is, who's Nicolas Maduro?
But if you find someone in South Florida, for example, who knows who Nicolas Maduro is, who can identify where Venezuela is on a map, that person will almost certainly say, well, because he's a communist or a socialist, he's exceedingly left-wing. And that is true. Nicolas Maduro and his government are very left-wing on economics.
Chapter 7: What alternative solutions are proposed for addressing the drug issue?
Not on social policy, by the way, which is kind of interesting. In Venezuela, gay marriage is banned, abortion is banned, sex changes for transgenderism are banned. It's one of the very few countries in the entire hemisphere with those policies. It is on social policy, not defending the regime, just saying. One of the most conservative countries in North or South or Central America.
Only El Salvador really comes close, which is much smaller, of course. And by the way, the U.S.-backed opposition leader who would take Maduro's place if he were taken out, is, of course, pretty eager to get gay marriage in Venezuela. So to those of you who thought this whole project was globo-homo, not crazy, actually.
So the average person when asked would say, we've got to get rid of the guy because his politics are bad, his ideas are bad, we're in favor of democracy. Of course, that's why we're supporting the unelected dictator in Ukraine, because we're for democracy. That's why we had the 2020 election. with the drop boxes and the fake mail-in ballots because we're for democracy.
But democracy, because we have a moral obligation to make sure that good government reigns in our hemisphere, that would be the answer. But that's not really a compelling answer. Is that really the reason? So if we see a leader in our hemisphere or anywhere in the world who's dictatorial, who, I don't know, cancels his own citizens, arrest them for saying bad things,
We overthrow that person, that's not really the standard. No, our closest ally in Europe is the UK.
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Chapter 8: What are the broader implications for U.S. foreign policy in Latin America?
And famously last year, the UK sent three times as many people to jail as Russia did for saying naughty things on social media. So the UK, the government of Great Britain under Keir Starmer is authoritarian. Obviously it's not a democratic government. You can have a democratic government with censorship by definition, of course.
If people can't say what they believe is true, they're not free people. It's not a democracy. They don't own the country. They're under the thumb of a dictator. But there's no move to liberate long-suffering Britons from Keir Starmer. Maybe there should be, but there isn't. So I think we can discount, we can safely discount democracy as a reason for affecting regime change in Venezuela.
We're not going to go kill Nicolas Maduro because we don't like the way he's treating his people. It's possible we're mad that he doesn't allow gay marriage. That is a distinct possibility, but no one will say that out loud. So what could be the other reasons? Well, energy. That's the obvious one. Venezuela has the deepest proven oil reserves, the biggest proven oil reserves in the world.
Venezuela has more oil than than Saudi Arabia does. Now it's low-grade oil, dirty oil, and its infrastructure, its oil extraction infrastructure is in terrible shape after 10 years of sanctions and mismanagement by the government, et cetera, et cetera. Again, none of this is a defense of Maduro's economic policies.
But they're not that out of whack with a lot of different places, a lot of different countries. In fact, they're not that different from the economic policies of the incoming mayor of New York. Actually, to be honest, the big difference is that Nicolas Maduro is a social conservative and Mamdani is all about transing your kids. But whatever. Oil. People say, well, of course it's about oil.
Is it about oil? Hmm. Doesn't seem to be about oil. There are a bunch of American oil companies, big ones and little ones, independent and publicly traded, who would like to get into Venezuela. They can't because of sanctions, but they'd like to change that so they can help Venezuela extract its mineral resources and make money in the process and presumably help the United States in the process.
They haven't been allowed to do that. So if your goal was to secure as much oil as you could, as much energy as you could for the United States and help American energy companies build their businesses, employ Americans, of course, you would stop moralizing long enough to let Americans rebuild Venezuela's aging extraction infrastructure. But we're not doing that. So is it really about oil? Hmm.
Probably not. Well, then it's about drugs. That's what we've been hearing now. It's about drugs. Venezuela is a drug dealing nation. Its regime is involved in drug trafficking. And by the way, it sounds true. Probably is true. Is Maduro or people around Maduro involved in the drug trade in some way? Probably would think so. How many Latin American heads of state aren't? That's a good question.
But it's not an excuse. It's bad. But how significant is Venezuela in the hemispheric drug trade? Like, if you're looking at the drug trade in the United States, how much of that comes from Venezuela? Well, we have a fentanyl crisis, famously. Does fentanyl come from Venezuela? No, it doesn't. It actually comes from Mexico. Huh. What about meth? Well, meth also comes from Mexico. Hmm.
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